Casa Alvar: a 24-room hotel shot while guests were checked in

The problem

Casa Alvar is a converted cork farm with twenty-four rooms, a pool and a restaurant, two hours from Lisbon. The owners were relaunching their website and joining a boutique hotel collection that required a fresh image library in three months. Their old photos were taken on a phone, and booking platforms kept flagging them for low resolution.

August was the only month the team could manage, and the hotel was fully booked. That meant photographing rooms in the gaps between check-out and check-in, working around breakfast and dinner service, and dealing with midday light that hit 39 degrees and flattened everything outdoors. The owners also wanted pictures that showed the land, not only the rooms.

Process

1. 01

   A schedule built on housekeeping

   I worked from the housekeeping rota, not a shot list. Each morning the manager gave me the rooms that would be empty from 11am to 3pm, and I photographed six of them a day in a fixed order. Exteriors moved to the edges of the day: pool and terraces from 6:30am, and the main house from 8:30pm at blue hour.

2. 02

   Drone, tilt-shift and a stylist

   A licensed drone covered the farmhouse in its cork oak landscape at sunrise, at 60 and 120 metres. Rooms were shot on a 24mm tilt-shift with window light controlled by thin muslin over the shutters. A local stylist reset each room between frames: linen, a book, figs from the garden, nothing that looked staged for a catalogue.

3. 03

   One grade across five markets

   I graded the set to a warm, low-contrast look that holds up on both phones and print brochures, then exported crops for the booking site, three listing platforms and the collection's print guide. Every file carries the room number in its name and metadata, so the reservations team can match pictures to rooms without asking.

Selected images

Outcome